I realized I should have probably kicked off Hello, Hilltop! with a bit of a house tour, or at least share the floor plan, but you’re going to have to settle with some shrubbery to start.
On Monday morning, I had just dropped Trevor off at work when I spotted this billboard:
Now, most people would just find this an amusing play on words (replacing the traditional “horns,” or more explicitly, “balls,” with “junipers,” for those of you confused by the pun), but considering Trevor and my recent endeavors tackling the yard, I found it hilarious and absolutely had to take a picture. It didn’t hurt that it had nice typography and a handsome, suited man on it either.
Anyway, a week from last Saturday, my bffl‘s dad, Bernard, came over bright and early to help us wrangle a large tree in our front yard. For those of you who have never met Bernard, he is somewhat of a character and has been chomping at the bit to tackle this tree since the day we even mentioned to him the slightest possibility of buying our house. So he came over with his collection of sawzalls (in other words, “compact reciprocating saws”) and scary, Saw VII 3D blades and proceeded to chop away.
Please try to ignore the terrible quality of my phone pictures and JUST LOOK AT HOW EXCITED HE WAS:
Seriously, like a kid in a candy store. HE WENT TO TOWN:
After about an hour and half, he gave us sweaty hugs, said, “You kids are great, kbai!” and left us with this:
(Not even half of it due to the angle.
Note to self: Take photos that make jobs look more impressive…)
Luckily, U-Haul had one truck left, an enclosed 14-footer that I far-too-excitedly dubbed “The Batmobile”:
…which we then stuffed full of brush and took to the transfer station. All 1140 pounds of it! WE FELT AWESOME.
Then we drove back home to clean out the truck and clean up ourselves before we turned it back it because we were clearly disgusting and we didn’t want the U-Haul people to think we had trashed their truck:
The truck had to be turned in at 4pm, so we didn’t have time to haul away the 12 bags of juniper needles we later raked up; but luckily, a few days later, our wonderful friends, Jenny and Trevor (yes, different Trevor; yes, things just got confusing) let us borrow their truck so we could take yet another trip to the transfer station (apparently, it’s our absolute favorite destination now):
You’d think we could just take the needles to a local gin distillery, but that’s probably not how gin is made. (Edit: Actually, that’s definitely not how gin is made.)
So now, about a week and a half later, with our yard relatively cleaned up, it looks like this. But now that there’s no tree in the way, you can see the ugly gas meters for the triplex next door from the sidewalk. Not attractive. But! When we picked up the truck from Jenny and her Trevor, I noticed this nice-looking fence that I’m pretty positive I can build (ooh, foreshadowing…).
(And yes, we know about allowing enough space around the meters so they can be accessed by the city.)
So, there’s our first massive project. We definitely grabbed the whole weekend by the junipers and could have used a nice tall glass of Tanqueray by the end of it (although I think we may have settled for a glass of cheap wine and an early bedtime). I have more smaller projects to post about, as well, so hopefully that will happen soon-ish!
Stay tuned!